The entire process went fairly well... as the machine was new and not currently my primary work machine, I had the flexibility to know that if I wiped the HDD, I could always just reinstall Mac OS X, which was necessary due to one ill-fated choice (see below). The process that eventually worked seems fairly straight forwards in retrospect, though without stumbling through the earlier mistakes, it most likely wouldn't seem that way now.

The entire process went fairly well... as the machine was new and not currently my primary work machine, I had the flexibility to know that if I wiped the HDD, I could always just reinstall Mac OS X, which was necessary due to one ill-fated choice (see below). The process that eventually worked seems fairly straight forwards in retrospect, though without stumbling through the earlier mistakes, it most likely wouldn't seem that way now.

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First I'll describe the process that worked and then will describe what didn't:

Revision as of 08:54, 13 March 2008

Contents

Overview

This page documents my process for configuring a triple-boot Macbook Pro with OS X 10.5.2, MS Windows XP SP2/Media Center, and Fedora Core 8/PlanetCCRMA. I carried out this procedure March 10-11 2008 successfully, relying on information from a number of older triple-boot web-links that I found via Google (see Links below). This installation was done on a factory-fresh new Rev. E model purchased on February 26, 2008 with the following specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.6 GHz

4GB RAM

200GB 7200RPM HDD

800MHz FSB, 6 MB shared L2 cache

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512 MB GDDR3 memory

8x Double-layer SuperDrive

LED Backlit 15.4" - 1440x900 resolution (16:10 aspect ratio)

Matte display

new Multitouch trackpad

Airport Extreme (802.11n) and Bluetooth

The entire process went fairly well... as the machine was new and not currently my primary work machine, I had the flexibility to know that if I wiped the HDD, I could always just reinstall Mac OS X, which was necessary due to one ill-fated choice (see below). The process that eventually worked seems fairly straight forwards in retrospect, though without stumbling through the earlier mistakes, it most likely wouldn't seem that way now.

First I'll describe the process that worked and then will describe what didn't:

ah! this worked, but only because either I switched my shell in OS X to tcsh, or because I ran as root (didn't confirm which made it work)

One solution is to nuke the first bit of the windows partition with zeros, destroying the filesystem metadata.
This causes the Windows installer to see the partition as type "unknown", and it will then dutifuly offer to reformat
it for you. This can be accomplished with the following, where rdisk0s3 is your windows partition (typically this would be
either rdisk0s3 or rdisk0s4)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s4 bs=1m count=100

now installing win xp

reboot and hold down alt/option

configure windows

crazy flashing "Installing applications..." window: "Please wait up to 30 minutes for the installation to complete... Do not press any keys during installation" C:\WINDOWS\system32\cscript.exe

reboot into windows

current issue... how to install mac drivers... how do you get them from Bootcamp? ne marche pas? how to make driver disk from bootcamp? no options to do so

* Go into Applications/Utilities
* Open Boot Camp Assistant. Print out the Instructions.
* Partition the drive by using the graphical slider in the Assistant and Accept the changes. Insert the XP disk. Let it reboot your system. It will load up into the XP installer. Install XP. After it is all installed and setup and you are in Windows, put in your Leopard disk and the drivers will install for all the devices( mouse, mic, iSight, video, etc). You are done.

booted back into OS X and used Disk Utility to wipe the Windows partition... lets try again...

re-installing Win XP... this time will try C: drive... strange because I read it has to be last partition and I thought the D: was last... maybe my windows will be named Linux and my Linux will be named Windows

While attempting to manually partition my disk for tripple boot (J-HFS+, J-HFS+, FAT-32), I ran into a situation where the windows installer would see the target partition as type "FAT-32" instead of "unknown", and so would not offer to reformat it prior to installation. Consequently, the windows partition was not bootable, and I received "Disk error" any time I tried to boot from it.
One solution is to nuke the first bit of the windows partition with zeros, destroying the filesystem metadata. This causes the Windows installer to see the partition as type "unknown", and it will then dutifuly offer to reformat it for you. This can be accomplished with the following, where rdisk0s3 is your windows partition (typically this would be either rdisk0s3 or rdisk0s4)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s4 bs=1m count=100
Another solution that worked for me is to specify an invalid filesystem type for the windows partition when using diskutil resizeVolume. This allocates the space, but the MBR doesn't flag it as FAT-32, so the Windows installer again offers to reformat it at install time.

ok... its late and i'm dead... will try this tomorrow: http://endlessparadigm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=4842 part 3... installing Fedora then resizing Windows partition there to "Unformatted" so that windows can be installed there on last partition... so annoying... so very cold...